The 50-kilometre race is two hours of pain. You are on alert every single second — no hiding, no coasting, no moment where you get to switch off. Emil Iversen, one of Norway’s best and a medal contender at the 2026 Winter Olympics in Val di Fiemme, put it perfectly when he remembered standing on the podium at Holmenkollen: “Fy faen, så kjedelig det er å gå her” — “F*ck, so boring to race here.”
And yet, when Dagbladet asked him about it ahead of the Olympic femmil last week, he said he was genuinely looking forward to it. Because boring or not, the 50km is a beast — and it demands a respect that the shorter formats simply cannot replicate.
That tension — between what’s hard and what’s watchable — is at the heart of a debate that’s been quietly splitting the cross-country skiing world. And I think it’s worth talking about.
The Distance Has Been Quietly Shrinking
Here’s something that surprised me when I first read it: during the very first Tour de Ski in 2006/07, the men’s field covered 78 kilometres across six stages. This past season, the same number of stages added up to just 47 kilometres. That’s not a small trim. That’s nearly a third of the race gone.
It’s not just the Tour. The 15km individual start has been reduced to 10km in the World Cup. The 30km has become 20km. Distances that defined what it meant to be a cross-country skier — distances that separated the truly tough from everyone else — have been compressed into something that better fits a TV schedule.
FIS president Johan Eliasch is pretty open about why. “This is about TV times and attention spans,” he told Dagbladet at the Olympics. The job, as he sees it, is to give audiences the best possible format. Shorter races, more action per minute, more viewers.
I understand the logic. I just don’t fully agree with it.
What the Long Ones Actually Do
Let me be real about something. I am not an elite skier. My personal femmil PR involves a flask of coffee and considerably more suffering than Emil Iversen experiences. But I have skied long enough to understand what happens to a person — and a race — when the distances get serious.
There is a rawness to a long cross-country race that shorter formats cannot manufacture. Martin Løwstrøm Nyenget, who took bronze in the skiatlon at these Olympics, made the comparison to Tour de France: “Folk liker å se gode utøvere bli helt ferdig” — people want to see great athletes completely used up. Finished. Done. That’s the appeal of endurance sport at its most honest.
The Tour de France is one of the world’s biggest sporting events precisely because you watch transcendent athletes brought to their knees by distance and time. You see who they really are when everything hurts.
A 10km race shows you who is fast on a given day. A 50km race shows you who you are.
Women at 50km — Finally
Something genuinely historic happened at these Olympics that didn’t get quite the attention it deserved. Women competed in the 50km for the first time in Olympic history.
That’s kind of the point, really. The sport simultaneously debates whether the distances are too long while also, finally, extending the longest race to women. Those two things happening at the same time says something interesting about where cross-country skiing is right now — pulled in opposite directions, trying to modernise and honour tradition at the same time.
Nyenget noticed the contradiction too. FIS argues for shorter races because of attention spans, and then in the same breath extends the longest race. “Det henger ikke på greip,” he said. It doesn’t add up.
The Case for Keeping It Long
I’ll acknowledge the other side. Karoline Simpson-Larsen, one of Norway’s women going into the 50km, said she has no interest in racing longer than she already does. And some athletes genuinely prefer the format shifts — more races, more varied terrain, quicker recovery.
The World Cup is built for that. Weekends of shorter, punchy races keep things exciting and give broadcasters predictable slots. That has value.
But the long format shouldn’t disappear. It should be the thing the shorter races point toward — the ultimate test, rare and prestigious precisely because of its rarity. The way the Olympics feel. The way Holmenkollen still feels, when everything is right.
Iversen said he’d like to see more 15km and 30km races. I think that’s fair. But let’s keep the 50km as the race that matters most, the one that asks the most, the one that makes people completely, beautifully finished.
Read Dagbladet’s full coverage of the debate — and see the brilliant photos from Val di Fiemme — here.
What do you think — are shorter cross-country races better for the sport, or are we losing something essential? Drop a comment below.
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